We don't get to choose the women who give us birth. I am not so sure I would have done such a good job of that if I could have preplanned my own entry into this world..
Face it, not all moms can love their kids, and usually those same moms have difficulty loving any person. I've ruminated over this throughout my years-from various angles and come to some conclusions. We can't really see the entire picture until we are adults. Even then, sometimes the trauma is too much to dispel the longing and those rigidly held myths that "moms are supposed to"...to what?
Turning trauma into understanding is what prompted my desire to become a practicing therapist for the past twenty years. It takes work and courage to acknowledge pain and the aftermath. Which is for eternity-( don't kid yourself it never disappears-)and if you are lucky it settles into an understanding, tinged with sadness, hopefully compassion. If you are very lucky an integration into your soul and very fiber which allows for loving relationships in the future, healthy ones-well, sort of, for the most part.
This is for all of you (-birth to those final breathing moments) who wander( bewildered, with a swiss cheese like ego) the universe, celebrating Mother's Day in some form 0f bittersweet, sadly, still confused or just resigned state.
No one wrote a recipe for Motherhood. Most women do their best and with as little scarring as possible, send their kids off to adulthood with mostly healthy skills.
Somewhere between Sybil's mother and June Cleaver, we survive our mothers.
My mother sent me an e-mail today. We don't usually maintain contact. It wasn't an argument, or a final say on my part that led to this vague separation. It was easy to just kind of trail off because my mom spent her life allowing relationships to trail off. Nothing had to be said.
I think I first realized she had her own problems when she spent eight months in bed. My father was a brutal man to all of us and she must have been depressed. I grew up quickly. For whatever reasons she spent her lifetime trying to disengage from the six children she had. At age 8 she told me she didn't believe we needed her anymore. That to six children under the age of nine. She married four times. She left each child behind in a ritual of anger-at times leaving us to fend for ourselves for months on end while she paid the rent on the house and gave us money for groceries. Kicking us out long before age 16, she did it for her husbands. Until no child was left. She proceeded to have two more children while I was having my first and left them behind at ages seven and five.
The list in my head continues-she was a lousy cook! Terrible housekeeper! Her method of dealing with her kids? Denigrating, jeering and taunting. Conflict? Slapping, name calling and her famous, silent treatment for days on end-which resulted in everyone of us, I think, on our knees begging for acknowledgement, something carried into adulthood for many of my sisters and brothers.
How did we grow up? Almost all successful-lousy marriages-relating with intimacy was such a mystery-we didn't even know it existed. I think we all thought every relationship was adversarial-until most of us got it right or recognized it would never be that way .
The most important lesson I learned over the years?
Don't waste a minute of precious time on the past. Not that it isn't a part of us but the joy that is in the world if one chooses to find it, live it and celebrate it is free! We are only prisoners in our minds -if we choose it.
I once saw a cartoon showing a man with a huge sack over his shoulder stuck in a doorway. He couldn't fit the bag through the door. When asked were he was going he yelled, "The future!"
The label on the sack? "The past".
I remind myself of that cartoon when I find myself trying to drag that old stuff into the future with me.
The greatest beauty of adulthood??
You get to choose! Yes! You get to eat dessert first, put your feet on the coffee table-or dining room table if you want! Go for it! You get to decide where and how you want to live.
Most importantly-you get to decide your own fate-not your parents.
Lousy parents give us a precious gift. A window into what we do not want to be, live or become. Most people don't get that glimpse and those, I think, become most like their parents. And bless you if you had great parents-we need more of you!
But us? We get to be more!!
We get to be ourselves. Because we learned to become discernible at a young age. We get to pass on the importance of relationships to our children. We have the gift of knowing love is never something to be taken for granted. Knowing how precious love, support, approval and encouragement is for children, we have the honor of bestowing it all on our children.
Such richness is for sultans-and we have it!!
Most importantly?
We know better.
